The following is a new description of a feature of the Irowor Trading platform. Please refer to the project site for more info.

Note: to follow the accuracy of plot data, the time the screenshots were taken is July 2026.

Note: I'm not considering paid plotting platforms here. I think there are some good ones - maybe barchart is one. Since Irowor is itself a paid platform that provides some charting, barchart et all are our competitors. You are welcome to subscribe to them or to us or to both. Since we try to provide a unique view of data, we believe our contribution to plotting is valuable to some customers, and our subscription is worth it.

Introduction

Too often aspiring traders look at the price action of a stock and think they get some insight from it - when they absolutely don't. What's worse, they may think they are getting useful information by staring at the historical price graph, but the opposite may be true: they are getting bogged down by reading patterns that are not there.

What is more, looking at the price history gets very, very time consuming. It is addictive. The platforms provide real-time push data, the squiggly line (as I call it) pulsates, mesmerizes you, draws all your attention until you cannot do anything else but to look at it. How is that a great way to spend your time? It isn't.

For myself, I made an effort to stop looking at price history plots entirely. I'll look at the current price, and try to keep the history in my memory. For example, I sort-of remember UNH being at around $400 recently. I just checked and UNH is around $425, 6% above what I pegged it at, in my mind. So it is above my expectation now. This is an illustration of how I think of the price of a stock "in the dark", so to speak, looking at the current price only, and not at a historical chart. Doing so clears my mind, allows me to un-addict myself from the squiggly line, and to position myself based on what I believe - even if I may be wrong sometime.

Some platforms make the price graphs particularly ugly, and looking at them really doesn't help, and only gets in the way. If the plot is overstretched in the x-axis, you look at it and think the price action isn't going anywhere, but it is going somewhere, it's just not visible because the plot is overstretched horizontally. Or maybe there is a peg at some level but you don't see it, because the plot is so stretched.

Then, google finance for example removed the 3-mo interval from their available selections of the time window. You used to be able to click 1-day, 5-day, 1-mo, 3-mo, 6-mo, 1-yr, 5-yr time windows, and follow the price change thusly. The 3-mo window is important, and it used to be present, but now it is missing and because it is missing, you'd have to change your way of thinking. No longer do you think "where was the price 1-mo, 3-mo, 6-mo, 1-yr ago?" Now you have to think: "where was the price 1-mo, 6-mo, 1-yr ago?" So you see how plotting can change your thinking, and as a trader you have to be very vigilant about that.

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Another thing I dislike about other platform's plots, and something that we at Irowor Trading try to correct, is the sliding window (zoom) in the y-axis. Yahoo finance (and others) scale price action to some canvas size. But if the price action is meek, if the stock is not going anywhere, then small unimportant and irrelevant movements are emphasized. Conversely, if the stock is breaking out (up or down), the plot zooms out and you are presented with a same-looking plot! You don't get the impression that the stock made a tremendous move - the squiggly line just moved from sort-of bottom left to sort-of top right. But what if the price action was crazy, did you feel it was crazy by looking at the chart? What if it was twice more volatile - but the plot only scaled and zoomed out - do you feel it was twice more crazy by looking at the plot?

I don't like the sliding y-axis window at all. If the price action goes wayyy out of boundaries, I want to see it go out of boundaries. I want it look at it and say, whoa that's unexpected, maybe it's an opportunity, or maybe it's a cause for alarm.

Our solution to this is, quite simply, a manual y-axis window. This also doubles as your "support" and "resistance" levels. You set the min and max (price) for the plot, per-stock, and that's the plot you're going to be looking at. If the stock moves out of the boundary, you have to say to yourself: gee, this is outside the expectation that I had. Then you go into the settings and change the min or max, or not change them, but the plot will not decide for you - neither what your expectation is, nor if the stock is breaking out of your expectation.

On the example of MSFT: here I believe the current trading range is 300-500. I'm also taking notes (with dates) about what I think about a stock. This helps me verify if what I thought e.g. a month ago turned out to be true or not.

Note: you can adjust the bucket size of the histogram, $4 in this case. If a stock trades at $50 then $1 histogram is appropriate, but if a stock trades at $500, then $5 or $10 histogram bar-width is appropriate. You can adjust that per-stock.

Another thing is outliers. You can decide for yourself if you should or should not consider outliers, but here is what I may -- sometimes, not always -- decide for me: if a stock moves e.g. 10% up and then immediately moves back down, that's not a peak for me. That's an abnormality not worth considering, not worth getting distracted by. It was the case for a few hours, and now it's not the case, and I don't want those data points. I'm playing a long-term game, and if there was an anomaly that I only had an hour and a half to take advantage of, I don't want that to affect my thinking. So if I set the min and max of a stock on the platform, the datapoints outside that range just get marked and displayed at-limit. Here is how TSLA looks for me:

I decided that I think about it as between $340 and $460.T hat it went above $460 a few times, and that a year ago it was significantly lower, does not change the way I think of it at present. I see it was out of bounds, and my plot favors clarity of thinking.

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And now for the actual value proposition of plotting as developed on our platform. Creating a different way of plotting *may* be worth doing, and that's the direction we took at Irowor Trading. Specifically, we offer the histogram of price action in 1-mo, 3-mo, 6-mo and 1-yr intervals (other intervals to be implemented as feature requests):

Let's look at MSFT again because I think it's an easier analysis than TSLA.

A histogram, as you recall, is a plot of the number of times the price occurs (y coord) over the possible range of prices (x coord. This way you can see (1) the most common price point over the last month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, to help you identify trends. You can also (2) see if the most common price point is moving. This may help you to identify trends as well as breakouts.

Note that the overflow values are accurately represented. For MSFT which traded above my expectation a year ago, the 1-yr histogram reflects that. In this particular example, the interpretation is that the 1-yr histogram of MSFT should not be used in decision-making. It is out-of-bounds. The price has moved lower: 

But for 6-mo histogram of microsoft, you can see the most common price has been $412. You can see it's been between $388 and $424 a lot. You can see it has come up to $480, so don't rule out that possibility happening again:

Over the last 3-mo, the price has stayed in the $404-$424 range. If you believe MSFT will trend-follow, the histogram says this is the range.

On our platform you can also collapse the price plot, and only look at the histograms. We believe that what is in front of you affects your thinking. So to have clear thinking, you can control what you see in front of you.